HRC Blog

BREAKING: Marriage Equality Bill in Hawaii Passes Committee

After hours of testimony in support and opposition of SB1, the marriage equality bill, the Hawaii State Senate Committee on Judiciary and Labor voted in favor, 5 to 2, of the bill and referred it to the full Senate for consideration.

In the group of over 1800 testifiers, Governor Abercrombie, who ordered the special legislative session for marriage, the state's Attorney General, statements from U.S. Senator Brian Schatz and U.S. Rep. Colleen Hanabusa, and former Supreme Court Justice Steven Levinson, all testified in support of the bill.

You may recall, Hawaii began the national conversation on marriage equality in 1993 when then Justice Levinson, authored Baehr v. Lewin, stating that a ban on marriage between same sex couples violated the state's law on sex discrimination. In 1998, Hawaii voters approved a constitutional amendment giving the legislature the power to define marriage.